Chef Chu's restaurant has served tech elite, from Steve Jobs to Jerry Yang

LOS ALTOS -- In the mid-1980s, then-Secretary of State George Shultz called an emergency meeting with other high-ranking officials in the Reagan administration -- and held it at an unassuming Chinese restaurant named Chef Chu's.

When the late Steve Jobs was creating Apple, he was a Chef Chu's regular. So many Intel executives have dined on Chef Chu's Peking duck that the restaurant named a room after the Santa Clara chipmaker. And tennis superstar Serena Williams recently gave Chef Chu's a shout-out on Twitter, announcing to her 3 million followers: "This place is insanely good! Thanks Chef! I love it!!!"

Chef Chu's, which has masqueraded as a family restaurant for more than four decades, is actually one of Silicon Valley's longest-running power restaurants. The valley's elite as well as many among its masses know Chef Chu's as a great place to get delicious sit-down or takeout Chinese food. They also know it as an institution run by a quirky owner who packs as much passion into his creations as any tech entrepreneur puts into cutting-edge designs. And among valley deal-makers and tech innovators, Chef Chu's is as much a networkers' paradise as the famed Buck's of Woodside.

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"Chef Chu's is an iconic power restaurant in the valley, and all the more powerful because it managed to stay off the radar," said Silicon Valley futurist Paul Saffo, a regular at the restaurant. "No restaurant has had the longevity of Chef Chu's for either quality of the food or popularity with the valley's movers and shakers. It's as vibrant and lively as it's ever been."

He added, "It's a place where you are not surprised to see someone."

On any evening or lunch hour, the tables are full and owner Larry Chu -- or his son, Larry Jr. -- greets guests and oversees the bustling kitchen, where cooks work woks over high flames and orders are barked out in Mandarin, Cantonese and English.

The 68-year-old Chu, in addition to serving up meals in his restaurant, has quietly built a small empire that includes cookbooks, a catering business, cooking classes and annual culinary pilgrimages he leads to Asia that always have long waiting lists.

One reason so many Silicon Valley elites are drawn to his restaurant is because they are drawn to him.

"He connects with everybody," said Della van Heyst, who used to direct a professional publishing course at Stanford University and helped Chu publish three cookbooks. "There is nothing effete about him. He fits into the whole spirit of the entrepreneurial valley."

Chu, who was born in mainland China but raised in Taiwan and Hong Kong, has a mind that races faster than his ability to speak his thoughts. He waves his hands and bounces on his seat as he retells how he once dreamed of building a Chinese fast-food chain -- "a restaurant on every corner in America" -- but tore up his business plan and decided to focus on just one restaurant.

His love for food began in Taiwan, where he was exposed to neighborhood markets selling fresh vegetables, fruits, fish and meats and delicious street food representing many of China's gastronomic regions.

His family moved to California in the early 1960s after his father, an architect, was commissioned to design the Taiwan pavilion at the World's Fair in Seattle and later became a Silicon Valley restaurateur. Chu followed his family to California a couple of years later and immediately landed a job as a busboy at Trader Vic's in San Francisco. "There was so much glamour, everybody went there -- movie stars, politicians," Chu recalled.

In 1970, Chu struck out on his own, in part to help him woo a young beauty, Ruth Ho, who at the time was dating a student studying for his Ph.D. at Stanford and later became Chu's wife.

"I joked that I had a Ph.D. -- I was poor, hungry, determined," Chu said.

He converted a small Los Altos laundromat that was wedged between a beauty salon and an appliance repair shop into a fast-food Chinese eatery. Six months later, he expanded into part of the struggling next-door beauty shop and set up a sit-down restaurant in which customers had to walk through the kitchen -- and past the gregarious owner who speaks of food as one speaks of art.

When a local reviewer gave him a glowing write-up, his restaurant filled up and his legend began. Chef Chu's has since taken over the entire complex, which is located on an odd-shaped patch of land at the corner of North San Antonio Road and El Camino Real.

"I worked my butt off," Chu recalled. "I collapsed in my bed every day. I cooked for 20 years in the kitchen."

Chef Chu's became something a cafeteria for startups, catering thousands of meals to budding companies such as VMware. With each new generation of startups came a new wave of tech stars: Executives from Box.com, a promising cloud storage startup located nearby, for instance, make frequent treks to Chef Chu's.

Chu has often had a front-row view of Silicon Valley's famed business leaders. He catered an event at the house of Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang when Terry Semel was appointed CEO in 2001. He served up dishes to Steve Jobs before he was the Steve Jobs.

"He'd come in here as a nobody," Chu recalled. "He'd wait 45 minutes to get a table and all of a sudden he's on the cover of Time magazine. I was busy making a living. I didn't know who he was."

Former Intel CEO Craig Barrett had his own booth at Chef Chu's. In an email, Barrett said he once saved a piece of fortune-cookie wisdom he received at Chef Chu's and referred to it when talking about the importance of education: "The world will always accept talent with open arms."

"I used to eat there all the time," Barrett said. "Every meal was fantastic."

Former Secretary of State Shultz, who has hired Chef Chu's to cater meals at his home, including the time he was meeting with former Australian Prime Minister Bob Hawke, remains a regular. He is particularly fond of the restaurant's Peking duck, which is stripped of much of its fat to meet the health-conscious tastes of Americans.

Shultz, who invited Chu to a White House state dinner in 1987 for French President Jacques Chirac, would have liked to have introduced President Ronald Reagan to the restaurant.

"It's hard for a president to go into a crowded restaurant," Shultz said in an interview. But, he added, "He would have liked it."